Though Stanislaw Lem earlier reported that he had no intention of seeing the Steve Soderbergh film version of his novel Solaris, Reuters reports, via Yahoo, that he did, and now states that in this version "Emotions have triumphed over intellect", while explaining the film's failure at US box offices by saying "Soderbergh has made a piece of ambitious, artistic cinema, which is a difficult nut to crack for mass audiences fed on Hollywood pulp." More remarks are on the English-language page of Lem's website, http://www.cyberiad.info/english/main.htm.

SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has named Katherine MacLean this year's SFWA Author Emeritus. Formal presentation of the honor will occur during the Nebula Awards Weekend in Philadelphia, April 18-20, 2003.

In addition, David Gerrold's The Martian Child (Forge) and Jim Grimsley's Boulevard are nominees in the Gay Men's Fiction category; Nicola Griffith's Stay (Doubleday) is a nominee in the Lesbian Fiction category; Rowe's Queer Fear II also appears in the Fiction Anthology category; and Lawrence Schimel's Found Tribe (Sherman Asher Publishing) is nominated in both the Nonfiction Anthology and the Spirituality categories. The awards will be presented at the Book Expo convention on May 29th in Los Angeles.

Leslie Fiedler, provocative literary critic who explored race and sexuality in American literature, and who paid more attention to genre fiction than most, died January 29, 2003, in Buffalo, New York, at the age of 85. His best known book was Love and Death in the American Novel, published in 1960. He edited In Dreams Awake, "a historical-critical anthology of science fiction", in 1975, reprinting canonical stories by Wells, Lovecraft, Godwin, Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Ballard, and others. Also of genre interest was Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided (1983).